Tag Archives: Jay Baruchel

Now that Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) is the chief of the village Berk, he’s about to have to make some tough decisions – especially since his village, humans and dragons alike, are about to face their darkest threat.

On the plus side, a female Night Fury appears and Toothless is just as awkward at romance as Hiccup!

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World premieres on March 1, 2019.

Doug Glatt is back in the sequel to the unlikely cult favorite Goon, Goon: Last of the Enforcers. Somehow, Glatt’s career isn’t over after the events of Goon.

Seann William Scott is joined by Jay Baruchel, Elisha Cuthbert, Alison Pill, Kim Coates, T.J. Miller and Liev Screiber in Goon: Last of the Enforcers. Premiers on Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17, 2017) in Canada. U.S. dates to be determined.

It’s a situation that’s familiar everyone of dating age – dumping/being dumped by someone and having to re-enter the dating pool. FXX’s Man Seeking Woman (Wednesdays, 10:30/9:30C) is a surreal series that stars Jay Baruchel as Josh Greenberg, a 25-year old guy who’s in that exact spot.

Recently, Baruchel spoke with a group of journalists/bloggers, including Eclipse’s own Lora Bofill and me, about the show.

Finally, the highly anticipated sequel How To Train A Dragon 2 opens this summer! Set five years after the original, Viking teen Hiccup and Toothless discover a secret ice cave housing hundreds of new wild dragons and the mysterious Dragon Rider. Director/writer Dean DeBloise and actor Jay Baruchel (Hiccup) talk dragons and more!

It’s that time of summer, again: Bruckheimer time. Instead of another National Treasure film, though, this time we’ve got The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – inspired by [and including an homage to] the Mickey Mouse/Sorcerer’s Apprentice short from Fantasia. It’s a loud, jam-packed, cheerily crazy piece of work that could spawn yet another franchise for Bruckheimer and star Nicolas Cage.

Earlier this week, I attended a 2D screening of How to Train Your Dragon and enjoyed it immensely – so much so that I decided I gad to see it in 3D. In 2D, I’d have given the film a solid B+, but after seeing it the way it was filmed, I definitely had to bump that up.

Probably She’s Out of My League’s biggest flaw is that it’s not actually a Judd Apatow movie. It has the requisite heart and humor [ranging from subtle to coarse, but going mostly with coarse] and a premise that, as far-fetched as it might seem, really isn’t [trust me on this one – I’ve been where Kirk is here, just not as overtly humiliatingly].

Tropic Thunder may well be the most [deliberately] politically incorrect film I’ve ever seen – and one of the funniest. The fake trailers alone are worth the price of admission! Ben Stiller’s film takes aim at every level of Hollyweird culture, from trailers to fraudulent writers to explosive studio executives – and is on target far more often than not.

When the writer of a book about the Vietnamese War [Nick Nolte] suggests that a first-time director [Steve Coogan] send his actors into the jungle – which has been seeded with cameras and various practical effects [explosions, gunfire and the like] – the cast members find themselves mixed up with a heroin cartel headed by a twelve-year warlord [Brandon Soo Hoo].

The actors are a truly motley assemblage of stereotypes: Tugg Speedman [Ben Stiller] the action star seeking legitimacy; Jeff Portnoy [Jack Black], star of the Fatties franchise and drug addict, also seeking legitimacy; Alpa Chino [Brandon T. Jackson], a rapper breaking into the acting game; Kevin Sandusky [Jay Baruchel], an actor in his first big movie, and Kirk Lazarus [Robert Downey Jr.], an Australian actor with multiple Oscars, who has his skin darkens to play a black character. None of them really has much of a clue, which leads to explosive ranting by studio head Les Grossman [a virtually unrecognizable Tom Cruise].

Stiller’s direction is pretty much on the money as his movie-within-a-movie allows him to show Hollywood at both its strangest and its worst. When we see the trailer for Simple Jack, for example, we aren’t seeing an attack on the mentally handicapped – unless we’re looking at Tugg Speedman for playing a mentally handicapped man solely to win an Oscar – or Kirk Lazarus for explaining, in a very funny bit, why simple Jack didn’t work. And speaking of trailers, the fake trailers that open the film are spot on satires of specific genre trailers, and are among the funniest moments in the film.

Other highlights include black rapper Alpa Chino keeping Lazarus honest as he plays a black character, even while he [Chino, that is] tries to flog his line of merchandise on camera; Coogan’s director, Damien Cockburn, taking charge; Speedman using what he’s learned from Lazarus to wow his captors in a live, less-than-no-budget performance; that the film becomes a big honkin’ war movie even as it satirizes the culture that creates an Apocalypse Now; Matthew McConaughey’s turn as Speedman’s TiVo-obsessed agent, and Danny McBride who steals every scene he’s in as the film’s special effects expert, Cody.

Tropic Thunder may be the best film Ben Stiller has ever made. It’s loud and crass, joyously politically incorrect, and well under two hours and gives us all the action of movies thirty minutes longer. In a summer that has had a number of good comedies, Tropic Thunder literally blasts its way to the next level.